Super Office — Architecture Practice, Sydney

Sited on the boundary of Abel Tasman National Park, this house sits a short distance from one of New Zealand's most celebrated coastlines, set within a regenerating beech-podocarp forest amongst mature kānuka.

To preserve the forest, the building occupies an existing clearing and is organised as a courtyard typology - pushing the structure to the forest edge and claiming the centre as a sun-filled outdoor room. We conceived the project as a series of rooms gathered beneath a single expansive roof.

This is not a house that behaves like a normal house. It asks something of the people who live in it - an attentiveness to outside, to weather, to the forest. Covered outdoor spaces frame apertures to the bush beyond, and double as sleeping areas for extended family - tents pitched beneath the eaves, sheltered but open to the outside.

The house is generous without being large. It bends and stretches to fit the rhythms of a big family without ever tipping into excess. The plan is tight and considered, the footprint small.

I lived on site for close to a full year during construction - off-grid, in a small temporary dwelling alongside the builder George and his apprentice Marty. We shared a kitchen and spent our days on the tools. It was an education in how buildings are actually made, and how a place changes as it comes together.

The house is fully self-sufficient - solar power, rainwater collection, independent of the grid. The clients are family.

Architecture - Patchwork Architecture, Project Architect - Rory Wilson-Cartwright (SUPER OFFICE), Structural - Spencer Holmes, Builder - Lovelock carpentry and building LTD.

The apartment looks directly onto a large tree. Its green dappled light shifts through the room across the day, and full-length mirror-faced wardrobe panels catch it, fold it back into the space, and keep it moving. At certain times of day it is almost like having the garden inside.

In a small apartment, light and air are everything. The challenge was making a proper bedroom — somewhere with its own identity — without closing the studio off and losing its cross ventilation. A raised cork platform with a recycled hardwood step separates the sleeping area just enough, while openings through the joinery wall keep light and air moving freely between the two spaces.

Almost everything was made by myself & my partner— the raised floor, the sliding daybed, the timber bench seat, the dining table, the bed base and headboard. The apartment keeps changing as it is lived in and developed further.

No curtains. The neighbourhood is too good to shut out — the sandstone terraces, the canopy trees, the neighbours hanging out their washing. That connection to the street is part of what makes Surry Hills worth living in.

The city is asking us a pretty direct question — do you actually need more space, or do you just need better space? And beyond the pragmatics, there's something more honest about it. You're in Surry Hills, one of the most connected and characterful neighbourhoods in Sydney, in a building with history, at a fraction of the footprint of a new development. Living small and well in the inner city isn't a compromise — it's actually a pretty compelling way to be in the world.